Section: Software and Platforms

The Scientific Programming InterNet (SPIN)

Participant : Serge Petiton [correspondant] .

SPIN (Scientific Programming on the InterNet), is a scalable, integrated and interactive set of tools for scientific computations on distributed and heterogeneous environments. These tools create a collaborative environment allowing the access to remote resources.

The goal of SPIN is to provide the following advantages: Platform independence, Flexible parameterization, Incremental capacity growth, Portability and interoperability, and Web integration. The need to develop a tool such as SPIN was recognized by the GRID community of the researchers in scientific domains, such as linear algebra. Since the P2P arrives as a new programming paradigm, the end-users need to have such tools. It becomes a real need for the scientific community to make possible the development of scientific applications assembling basic components hiding the architecture and the middleware. Another use of SPIN consists in allowing to build an application from predefined components ("building blocks") existing in the system or developed by the developer. The SPIN users community can collaborate in order to make more and more predefined components available to be shared via the Internet in order to develop new more specialized components or new applications combining existing and new components thanks to the SPIN user interface.

SPIN was launched at ASCI CNRS lab in 1998 and is now developed in collaboration with the University of Versailles, PRiSM lab. SPIN is currently under adaptation to incorporate YML, cf. above. Nevertheless, we study another solution based on the Linear Algebra KErnel (LAKE), developed by the Nahid Emad team at the University of Versailles, which would be an alternative to SPIN as a component oriented integration with YML.